Tugboat related issues, comments, and opinion.

I remember, so I didn’t watch.

On September 11th 2011 I didn’t tune in for the network “memorials” to drag my soul through it all over again. It’s enough to have lived that day once.

I mourn the losses my friends and neighbors suffered and the harm it has done to my own family.

I am pissed that we’ve spent so much of our time and a trillion or more dollars so many thousands of miles from our shores chasing human garbage.

I am saddened by the losses our armed forces and their families continue to suffer in the name of National Security, I honor their sacrifices. I can’t thank them enough.

I remember when the towers were nearly complete. I watched from my hometown on Raritan Bay as they reached their apex. They were readily apparent on the horizon.

Later on as a young deckhand, I helped deliver the construction materials that would become Battery Park City.

I clearly remember the vista the observation deck afforded me, my wife and my young daughter that evening in October 1984 when it was so clear at dusk you could almost see forever. The city scape looked like a gilded scale model.

I was part of the Statue of Liberty 100th Anniversary Celebration in 1987 and had the duty of towing one of the many firework barges the Grucci Family had set up for an unbelieveable show. I’m spoiled on fireworks forever. I remember how during the show the reports from the shells echoed in and around the towers as we held station at the foot of the South Tower .

I remember where I was when the unimaginable occurred. My “where was I” story isn’t worth telling compared to so many others.

I’m still in awe of how the New York Maritime community was able to evacuate more than 500,000 people in about nine hours from lower Manhattan. It’s amazing how so many people were taken to safety in such a short time. (During WW2, the Dunkirk Boat lift took nine days to move over 338,000 troops from the coast of France.)